If you’ve ever taught with a Wikipedia assignment or enrolled in one of our Wiki Scholars & Scientists professional development courses, you’re familiar with Wiki Education’s Dashboard and all of the ways it tracks your Wikimedia work, not to mention the thrill of watching the readership statistics of your contributions climb.
To date, more than 150,000 people have engaged with the Dashboard through our educational programming and nearly 4,000 instructors have used it for their courses. But the impact of this open source technology reaches beyond even our own programming – used by the broader Wikimedia community, our global Programs & Events Dashboard has supported more than 110,000 users and thousands of editing events worldwide.
As an open source technology, the Dashboard is developed through public collaboration and its source code is freely available for anyone to use. But who exactly works to create and sustain the Dashboard, and how? Wiki Education’s Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross and a few of its many contributors took us under its hood during last month’s Speaker Series webinar, “Open Source Technology: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard.”
“A huge number of other people [beyond myself] have come along to make major contributions to this code base,” said Ross, recognizing the work of nearly 200 Dashboard contributors since its inception.
Panelist Matthew Fordham, a software developer based in Seattle, helped oversee the initial development of the Dashboard and has collaborated with Ross for many years.
“It’s amazing and so gratifying to hear how what we started so long ago has continued to evolve and grow, and become so much deeper and more sophisticated,” said Fordham. “With open source and with this project, there’s a lot of potential.”
Ross and Fordham were joined by university students Sulagna Saha and Om Chauhan, who discussed their experiences working to improve the Dashboard.
Saha, a senior at Mount Holyoke College studying computer science, came to the project in summer 2023 through Outreachy, a program that provides internships in open source and open science.
In the year since her internship, Ross said he “[hadn’t] had to touch [Saha’s] code at all,” something that’s rare in a field where maintainers frequently have to tweak older code so it can work with changes elsewhere in the code base. “It makes me really proud as a mentor. You made a product worth its weight in gold.”
When asked to reflect on her experience working on the open source project, Saha explained how she transitioned from feeling nervous to feeling welcome.
“Open source is kind of like entering a room where it feels like everyone knows everything, because it’s collaborative,” explained Saha. “But because it is collaborative, it is the best space to feel safe and ask anything.”
Chauhan, a junior at Bennett University, brought his experience as a computer science major to the Dashboard this past summer through Google’s Summer of Code program. Like Saha, Chauhan underscored the community-driven nature of working on open source technology, as well as the importance of exploring the documentation and existing contributions when entering an open source project.
“For someone who is new to the project, be patient, integrate gradually, and engage with the community,” advised Chauhan.
Fordham, who works in both open source technology and the private sector, finds that contributing to open source projects can be particularly rewarding.
“The more open source contributors, the more opinions on what the goal is, so it’s a totally different thing [than the private sector], and in so many ways, more gratifying,” said Fordham. ”It doesn’t simplify things to have more cooks in the kitchen, but the reasons they are there are sometimes more heartfelt.”
Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard,” and join us for a very special edition of our Speaker Series on Tuesday, December 10:
Celebrating 10 Years of Wiki Education
Tuesday, December 10 at 10 am Pacific / 1 pm Eastern
